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          <b>Table of Contents</b>
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              <a href="introduction.html#upgrade_version">Library version information</a>
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      <p>
            This manual describes how to upgrade from historical versions
            of Berkeley DB (Berkeley DB 4.7 and older).  
            For information on upgrading newer releases 
            of the product (anything newer than DB 4.7), and on
            building and installing Berkeley DB on all of the platforms it
            officially supports, see the
            
           <a class="ulink" href="http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17076_02/html/installation/index.html" target="_top">
                Berkeley DB Installation and Build Guide.
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              <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="upgrade_version"></a>Library version information</h2>
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        <p>Each release of the Berkeley DB library has a major version number, a minor
	version number, and a patch number.</p>
        <p>The major version number changes only when major portions of the Berkeley DB
	functionality have been changed.  In this case, it may be necessary to
	significantly modify applications in order to upgrade them to use the new
version of the library.</p>
        <p>The minor version number changes when Berkeley DB interfaces have changed,
and the new release is not entirely backward-compatible with previous
releases.  To upgrade applications to the new version, they must be
recompiled and potentially, minor modifications made (for example, the
order of arguments to a function might have changed).</p>
        <p>The patch number changes on each release.  If only the patch number has
changed in a release, applications do not need to be recompiled, and
they can be upgraded to the new version by installing the new version
of a shared library or by relinking the application to the new version
of a static library.</p>
        <p>Internal Berkeley DB interfaces may change at any time and during any release,
without warning. This means that the library must be entirely recompiled
and reinstalled when upgrading to new releases of the library because
there is no guarantee that modules from the current version of the
library will interact correctly with modules from a previous release.</p>
        <p>To retrieve the Berkeley DB version information, applications should use the
<a href="../api_reference/C/envversion.html" class="olink">DB_ENV-&gt;version()</a> function.  In addition to the previous
information, the <a href="../api_reference/C/envversion.html" class="olink">DB_ENV-&gt;version()</a> function returns a string
encapsulating the version information, suitable for display to a user.</p>
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